[Talk-de] Hello from England
SteveC
steve at asklater.com
Mo Jun 29 16:50:35 UTC 2009
Hello
So, first I apologise for writing in English. My German is very poor.
Several people have volunteered to translate back and forth.
Recently I had the luck and privilege to travel to some places in
Germany, Italy and other countries and meet OSMers. This was very
educational and I learnt a lot about how the different communities
work in these places. There are some subtle differences between
different countries and how OSM works in each one. Some have more
mapping parties. Some have meetings like Stammtisch. Some have PR.
Some organise on the mailing list. These are healthy differences.
One thing I noticed a lot everywhere though was some misunderstandings
on what the foundation, the OSMF, are doing. It feels a little like
FUD[1]. These misunderstandings related to the license, the servers,
the working groups, the software, the State of the Map conference and
other things.
What I quickly found was that these misunderstandings could be
corrected easily with some discussion. It seems I and the Foundation
have tried to include people from Germany many times, but we have not
tried hard enough. This is partly because the volunteers from the
foundation are already doing a lot of work and are busy we sometimes
overlook things. It was a big surprise to me that people I met in
Germany said I should post to talk-de@ in English and this would be a
good thing for example. We have always assumed you would not like this
in a big way. So I learnt something very important.
So, in the spirit of communication I would like to say I am here to
answer any open questions you have. You might have heard that I am
Evil[2] or that we are changing license to be Evil like CDDB[3]. In
general this is not the case, and we are OSMers like you who are
trying to make it better, safer, more reliable and of course map more
things. So please assume anything here you see as negative is not
meant to be.
Let me tell you a story about the Italian OSM.it conference I went to
a few weeks ago. They had a lawyer do a talk about the new ODbL
license to check that it was not Evil and what the points of it were.
Half way through the lawyer said something like "yes you should use it
as it does basically the same as CC-BY-SA but it much better and
applies to data better". There was visible relief and smiles from the
audience when he said this. I just turned up to the conference without
any warning and had nothing to do with it. I have cc'd a leading
Italian OSMer, Simone, who can verify this. I don't think I will be
able to bring a similar happiness to you all by talking on the mailing
list here, but I hope it helps.
So, can I answer any questions or do you have any comments?
Best
Steve
[1] - http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_Uncertainty_and_Doubt
[2] - http://fakestevec.blogspot.com/
[3] - http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote (this could do with a
better link I think?)
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